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Web Site Traffic Builder

Does your site suffer from the dreaded invisibility syndrome? If so, Dave Cook could hold the solution…

With the help of an application like Microsoft’s FrontPage, building a professional-looking Web site these days is fairly easy. The tricky bit applies to getting the site noticed. Not an easy task when you consider that millions of other sites on the Internet are all vying for the same attention.

In fact, there various ways in which you can boost site traffic. One method is to manually submit your site to the most important search engines. Only that requires hours of patience. Another way is to subscribe to an online service, but such services aren’t cheap and usually require an ongoing fee.

Alternatively, you could invest in a program such as Web Site Traffic Builder from Intelliquis (www.intelliquis.com). Traffic Builder can substantially reduce the time and effort involved in getting your Web site noticed. It does so by automating the task of submitting your site information to the most popular searches engines including Excite, Google, Yahoo, and, of course,  AOL. Then, having finished your submissions, the program enables you to check your site’s rankings via the Web’s top search engines.

There are three editions of Traffic Builder available: Standard (£49.95), Gold (£129.95), and Platinum (£269.95). The former is primarily aimed at home users. The Gold and Platinum editions are targeted at business users, with the latter edition allowing you to submit profiles for an unlimited number of URLs. Traffic Builder is compatible with Windows 95, 98, NT, and 2000 but note that version 4.0 fails to mention whether it supports Windows XP.

Getting Started

The first time Traffic Builder is launched, it automatically checks the Intelliquis site for any files that might need updating. Also included is an Auto Update feature, which enables you to perform these checks as often as you wish.

To begin the process of publicising your individual Web pages, and hence your site, you head for the Site Info form. Traffic Builder uses the details stored in this form to submit and register your Web page on the various search engines. It’s important to note that the more information you supply, the greater the chance a search engine will accept your submission.

As you might expect, Traffic Builder supports the use of meta tags, which is a special (hidden) HTML tag picked up by search engines. Meta tags are important if you want your site to achieve high rankings. Usefully, if an existing Web page contains meta tags, then Traffic Builder can import this information from the page. You can also create your own meta tags, and a simple HTML editor is also provided should you wish to edit HTML code.

With your freshly-edited Web page uploaded back to your site, you can then pick and choose the categories and sub categories of search engines you wish to submit to. Afterwards, you go online and click the Submit button to begin the process of registering your site.

Keeping Tabs

Traffic Builder also provides a number of tools designed to help you determine the amount of interest your site is generating.

For example, you can search up to 18 different engines to see whether any of your Web pages rate a mention. Alternatively, you can check the visibility of your site via a ranking feature using different keyword searches. If you’re not happy with the results, a page optimiser is included to help you achieve the highest ranking possible.

Reaping The Benefits

Overall, the program can be a great time-saver; just don’t expect your submissions to be accepted by every search engine. Your mileage may vary, but we had a success rate of around 80 percent; for best results, aim to provide Traffic Builder with as much information as possible.

Once submitted, be warned that it can take days and sometimes even weeks for some top search engines to review and add your site to placement lists. That said, traffic on our site improved substantially within just a few of days of submitting Web pages.

Traffic slowed somewhat after a week or so, but that’s hardly the fault of the program. And besides, resubmitting the pages inevitably brought about an increase in traffic. Be warned, though, that this little trick shouldn’t be attempted too often for fear of incurring the wrath of those all-important search engines.